Preserving Gaming History

Posted by Stropp on January 15, 2009

The thing with events like the Wikipedia Threshold war is that they tend to kick up a lot of dust. Everyone is talking about them, and consequently, a meme is born and takes on a life of its own.

I was reading Rick’s post about Quake Live and Gaming Nostalgia which referred to a previous post of his, and it gelled with something I was thinking about at work today regarding the preservation of knowledge.

The great Threshold beat down at Wikipedia really shows how fragile information is on the Internet. One small group or individual can easily remove or change something that is of a historic or notable nature to another group. The average guy on the street could care less about Threshold, or for that matter Wikipedia, but to the gaming community these bit of knowledge are as precious as the Klingon Bible is to a dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie; or the intricate details of troop movements at the Battle of Gettysburg are to a Civil War enthusiast. (Been to Gettysburg… very cool.)

I suggested in my post, Fear and Loathing at Wikipedia, yesterday that the decentralization of information on the web is the best way to preserve it. But it’s still not perfect. Even with such devices as the wayback machine, digital information is still fragile.

Even now, people are still finding old movie reels containing films made in the early twentieth century. Data, if you like, lost in time is being recovered. Images on celluloid can be restored.

But when a collection of bits is gone, it’s gone.

How do we preserve our gaming history?

Popularity: 4% [?]